plutil(1) BSD General Commands Manual plutil(1)
NAME
plutil -- property list utility
SYNOPSIS
plutil [command_option] [other_options] file
...
DESCRIPTION
plutil can be used to check the syntax of property list files, or convert
a plist file from one format to another. Specifying - as an input file
reads from stdin.
The first argument indicates the operation to perform, one of:
-help Show the usage information for the command and exit.
-p Print the property list in a human-readable fashion. The
output format is not stable and not designed for machine
parsing. The purpose of this command is to be able to eas-
ily read the contents of a plist file, no matter what for-
mat it is in.
-lint Check the named property list files for syntax errors.
This is the default command option if none is specified.
-convert fmt Convert the named file to the indicated format and write
back to the file system. If the file can't be loaded due
to invalid syntax, the operation fails.
fmt is one of: xml1, for version 1 of the XML plist format
binary1, for version 1 of the binary plist
format json, for the JSON format
There are a few additional options:
-- Specifies that all further arguments are file names
-s Don't print anything on success.
-r For JSON, add whitespace and indentation to make the output
more human-readable.
-o path Specify an alternate path name for the result of the -con-
vert operation; this option is only useful with a single
file to be converted. Specifying - as the path outputs to
stdout.
-e extension Specify an alternate extension for converted files, and the
output file names are otherwise the same.
DIAGNOSTICS
The plutil command exits 0 on success, and 1 on failure.
SEE ALSO
plist(5)
STANDARDS
The plutil command obeys no one's rules but its own.
HISTORY
The plutil command first appeared in Mac OS X 10.2.
Mac OS X August 30, 2002 Mac OS X
Mac OS X 10.9 - Generated Sun Oct 13 09:03:09 CDT 2013